I am glad to hear that, because I tried to figure out all the details for the poisons, symptoms, what an O.D. death would look like, how the authorities would react to so many deaths in one year, the political structure of a small town, the symbiotic/sympathetic realities of several small communities… You get the point. My brain exploded. My writing came to a screeching halt.

So, no more real research until the first draft is completely finished.

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Tell Us About Your Writing Process

He says he just starts on page one and hopes to finish within a few months so it can be published.

I think I may have made something of a mistake when I wrote a very detailed outline. Now it feels the way he described it, as though the story has almost lost it’s fascination for me. The story has already been told. Although, hopefully my characters will continue to let me know their opinions along the way, and that should allow for some interesting twists and turns. Besides, as Stephen King says, if the author is bored, so is the reader. Paraphrasing of course.

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Any Tips For Budding Authors?

The book needs to be vibrant and alive…

In my thinking, this means that you really need to listen to what your characters want, pay attention to what they would and wouldn’t do. When you know your characters well enough they often kick up their heels when things get too boring, or if you are trying too hard to cram them into a mold.

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His parting advice:

Ignore all advice.

Ha ha ha. Really, I have been wondering if listening to too much advice (ahem, and reading too many articles) is part of my problem. Instead of just getting the story down, powering through the more difficult parts, I started looking for outside thoughts.

It’s my own fault. What is life for if not to learn. Well, I am learning my lesson as I struggle through this first draft.

I guess it’s time to shrug and just dive in. Time to bury myself in the project and not come out until the book is finished.

Hmmm, guess it’s time to dig up my perseverance, for when people tell me I’m not doing it right. For when they say there’s a better way, an easier, faster way. I have tried those. Believe me. Now it’s time for me to just do it my way.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer’s life. ~James Norman Hall*

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe*

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Sometimes spending time somewhere pretty while your mind wanders is the best way to come up with a new idea.

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It’s interesting how much time is spent just thinking about your project. Before a pen is put to paper, or fingers poise above the keyboard, the mind has spend at least a little while contemplating where the story will go. Sure, a few of my flash fictions came out of my imagination as I was writing them. But for the most part, a story needs to percolate for a while.

Rushing the process usually turns into a disaster, because the ideas are not fully formed. You spend so much time trying to put your thoughts together that what you end up writing is more like a stilted conversation with yourself. Believe me, I have pages of the stuff in my novels. And that’s ok sometimes. There are times when the ideas don’t come smoothly and you need to do some hashing out. You need to write it out so you can see it all, and rearrange things so the story flows.

However for the most part you want to let your thoughts wander all over the story. Get to know you main characters. Invite them over for a big round table discussion in your mind. Or have each of them over for a quiet cup of coffee, as you sit in your favorite chair, looking as though you’re peacefully asleep. In a way, that is the best kind of dreaming.

You can learn all the technical stuff, but if you don’t love your story through and through there’s very little chance that you’re going to stick with it long enough to actually finish writing it. And if you’re bored with it in the first draft, who else is going to be interested enough to finish reading it?

So first and foremost, you must be in love with your story.

After that, it really just falls to what kind of writer, person, personality, worker you are. The little details ofHow you write are not quite as important as whether or not you Want to write this story.

So, on days when I don’t write anything, I will have to admit it to myself while writing a big zero on that day. No guilt trips. No punishments. Just having to fess up to myself that the work was not done.

Hopefully this will help, not hinder.

If it becomes an obstacle… then it’s out.

I’ll try some other way of holding myself accountable. I’ll keep trying and trying until I find what works. 😀

Inch by inch,

it’s a cinch.

– Robert H. Schuller

This popped up on Twitter today, and is, I think, one of the best one-sentence pep-talks I have ever heard.

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Don’t look at the big picture too often. It will scare you. It scares me.

Set your goals. Plan your smaller steps for getting to each goal. Then, just put your head down and work on it all one tiny bit at a time.

I have a terrible habit of concentrating on the end result…and seeing all that work piled up between me and it.

That view scares the living peanut butter out of me.

However, now I have that quote sitting beside my computer. Hopefully it will remind me to just look at the little piece of work I have to do next. Tiny, little steps don’t make me want to run and hide. I can get those done.

Just don’t ask me what all I have to do before the book comes out. That’s when I have to sit down and focus on my breathing.

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Do you feel like you need a tranquilizer after looking at your publishing to-do-list?

If you’ve published something already, would you feel comfortable sharing one or two of your most used sanity saving tips?

You don’t have to be a writer to answer these questions. Just think of your biggest project, and let us know your thoughts. 🙂

A few weeks ago I asked ReGi McClain to write a guest post about writing, marketing, social media, or something. Yeah, I was pretty much that vague. With that jumbled request, she came back with this lovely post (she even chose the video. Nice!).

So, without further jabbering from me, here’s ReGi. 😀

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It was my favorite housekeeping guru who pointed it out. We like to think of ourselves as gods. In his book, Clutter’s Last Stand, Don Aslett viciously confronts the human tendency to create and control little worlds by collecting knick-knacks and arranging them just so. My grandmother is a prime example of this phenomenon. By the time she and my grandfather moved out of the home they owned for 30 years, she collected hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of trinkets from around the world. Nothing interesting there, right? Millions of people do that.

So why do I bring up my grandmother? Because, unlike most people who amass armies of gewgaws, my grandmother remembers the stories behind each and every one of her treasures in vivid detail. Not only can she tell you where, when, and why she got them, she can usually tell you what materials and methods were used in making them, the cultural significance of those materials and methods, and possibly even the name of the artisan and his aunt’s husband’s cousin’s new boyfriend. Okay, okay, so maybe not the new boyfriend. I assume the girl in question would have married the fella or moved on by now.

Writers are a lot like collectors. We take our little baubles, our characters and conflicts, and arrange them until we like what we see. But do we, like my grandmother, take the time to get the story behind each? If you don’t write speculative fiction, as I do, perhaps you don’t think you need so much backstory. Not so. Maybe you don’t need to decide whether the dragon likes his maidens medium-rare or well done, but at least know why your story needs to happen in London instead of any other major metropolis. Perhaps the anatomical location of the alien’s nose is of no importance to you, but do you know why that character is mind-bogglingly shallow?

Mind you, I don’t think you should start any collections. I’d have to spend weeks with my grandmother to get every story. Sadly, with all those ornaments competing for space with each other, all of them lost value. When I visited to pick out the things I wanted to keep, I passed up many costly, beautiful things because they held no importance to me. Instead, I kept an ugly metal pig. Why? Because my grandmother told me its story. I know it’s real value.

Don Aslett believes in ruthlessly giving away everything that doesn’t hold true significance for you. Not just marginal sentimental value or potential usefulness someday. No. We’re talkin’ actively-contributing-to-your-current-well-being importance. The same principle can be applied to writing. When you look at your literary knick-knacks, do you remember why you kept them? Are they truly important? Then put them out where we can see them! Toss the rest. You don’t have to give us your reasons for keeping each treasure unless it’s important to the story, but if you’ve done it right, we, like any fascinated guest, will ask you for more details.

I think, to an extent, it comes down to your personality and what you are trying to multitask…er, with.

If you are juggling a few things at the same time and you can make it work just as well together as apart, then good for you. There are some tasks which seem to go together very well, and it is no real stretch to work on them side by side.

On the other hand, if you are a focused type, who prefers to concentrate on one thing at a time, you might do better to steer clear of multitasking. The last thing you want to do is burn yourself out by mentally (or physically) running around in circles.

Or…

If you are trying to do something important while also letting yourself be distracted by something trivial, your work will suffer. Either it will take twice as long, or you will end up having to edit the tar out of it at a later date. Not really a desirable outcome.

Say you are trying to get an essay written. You are typing away on this project that is due tomorrow afternoon, when your friend starts texting you about the movie they’re watching. This divides your brain’s energy between two very different things. You’re trying to sound smart in the essay, but using texting short-cuts on your phone. You are also trying to remember your research facts, and pull up memories of the movie they are referring to. The essay will suffer, and your friend will think you’re not interested in the conversation because you take an extra couple minutes to reply.

That’s not to say that technology is bad for productivity. Word sprints with your Twitter friends look like they could be a lot of fun while helping you reach your word count goal for the day . But here, you agree to do a task, set a time limit, put Twitter aside while working on your writing, then switch back to Twitter after the sprint is finished.

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So, I’m not saying that multitasking is bad for you. I just think that there are times when we need to concentrate on one task at a time so that we can get it done better and faster.

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Now if I could only remember this in every day life. *eye roll*

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What are your thoughts on multitasking?

Do you do a lot of it, or are you a strict one thing at a time worker?

Little Details

Stealing Makes Bad Ju-Ju!

We all know that everything I write is Amazing and Awesome. I get informed of that fact several times a day by my second personality.
Just remember that what I have written here is Mine. I hate to go all two-year-old on you, but that's my hard work and it's staying mine.

Now if you see something on here that's just cooler than eskimo snot, and you just Have to use it somewhere in your life, please let me know and I'll see if we can work something out (actually, my lawyer will tell me if we can work something out).